Jim and me were cleaning out the garage at my mom's house when we stumbled upon a couple of ancient file boxes containing a bunch of school stuff from when we were small. I found copies of the junior high school news rag I used to write for. I found old preschool photos of me and a report I did on the state of Washington. I found a limerick I made in the 6th grade and a plaster impression of my 5-year-old hand.

The best thing that came out of that box was a 22-page comic book I made in the 4th grade called "Green Dragon vs. Mr. Radioactive". It's a gory ninja fantasy replete with spin-kicks, kidnapping, explosions, shootings, decapitations, and deaths-by-boomerang. The plot follows the adventures of the Green Dragon as he attempts to rescue his "scout team" from the clutches of Mr. Radioactive. Most of the action involves our hero assaulting robot-infested bases designed in the style of Bowser, King of the Koopas. These scenes appear to be lifted wholesale from so many classic 8-bit video game storylines, in which the protagonist is forced to complete many meaningless, tedious objectives (generally involving pits of lava and falling chandaliers made of spikes) before confronting the villain.

The quality of the art is pretty inconsistent. At nine years old, you can do legs, animals, and weapons, but not hands, machines, or poses. I can tell I was pretty concerned about continuity errors at the time--the scenes where the Green Dragon drops his scabbard or when his arm suddenly heals were obviously added after I finished the comic and realized that I forgot to draw in scabbards and arm blood after the first few panels in which they appear. It also kind of looks like I didn't understand that I could write the dialogue first and the bubbles later, because there is a lot of text that drifts over the lines.

When I showed it to Justine and Jason they gathered everyone around and Justine made Jason read it out loud. "Do the voices, too!" she demanded. So Jason did the Green Dragon (pinched skinny anime protagonist voice), Mr. Radioactive (confident muhaha baritone), the newscasters (sorta the same as the Green Dragon, only more constipated), and the bear (bear-voice). Justine kept pointing out little features of the comic that she thought was neat. She liked how I colored only a few things in the entire comic, like the Green Dragon, and fire, and blood. She also liked how I kept the Green Dragon out of frame, ninja-like for some of the panels. Of course for both of these cases I did them because I was lazy. The "selective use of color" was due to an unwillingness to color anything else, and if the Green Dragon didn't appear in a particular panel, it was because I didn't want to draw the poor bastard another time. So if I did something neat, I did it without being conscious of it, either by instinct or by accident. That's one really cool thing about being a kid. If the inspiration strikes you the right way, you can sit down for hours on end and churn out a couple dozen pages of comics without worrying about how clever you are, or if what you end up creating is any good at all. You're not worried about technique or craft or how people will react to you when you're done.

Well, anyway, I'm sure you want to read it. Knock yourselves out.